The Utopia Experiment

51

Jon Smith had been lost at least eight times in the last hour — only six of which were on purpose. But now he felt confident enough that he wasn’t being followed to emerge from the maze of souks onto an open road.

Taxi drivers slowed as they drove by but he waved them off and kept moving along the sidewalk, avoiding eye contact with the people he passed. Sirens were still audible as the police and military responded to the shooting, but that was more than three kilometers east now.

He came to an innocuous door on a street dedicated to the sale of scrap metal and gave a complex knock calculated to sound clandestine. A moment later the door swung open and he stepped into the dim interior of an apartment he’d found on the Internet. It looked just like a safe house should: dilapidated and austere with curtains tucked carefully around the lone window.

“Is he all right?”

“Nothing serious,” Randi said, continuing to stand next to the door with her gun drawn while Eichmann sat frozen in a chair. Most of his right pant leg was cut off and a makeshift bandage was wound around his thigh.

“Were you followed?” she asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to milk the illusion of imminent danger.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. But we probably shouldn’t stay long.”

“I don’t understand,” Eichmann said, exhaustion and fear clear in his voice. “Who are you?”

“We’re the people keeping you alive,” Randi said.

“You’re American. Do you work for the government?”

Smith took a seat across the small dining table from the scientist. “I’m Dr. Jon Smith.”

The immediate recognition wasn’t surprising. Eichmann would know the name of the man in charge of the U.S. military’s Merge program.

“Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

“We’re here because the Merge was used in Afghanistan before its official release.”

Eichmann was an academic, not a spy — something that was obvious in the way his every thought played out across his face. He knew about Afghanistan and was terrified that Smith did too.

“Yesterday, someone leaked that I’m looking into what happened there,” Smith lied. “And that I knew about you. We were concerned for your safety and came as fast as we could. Good thing we did.”

“Leaked?” Eichmann said. “Leaked to whom?”

Smith leaned back in his chair. “Christian Dresner.”

“I…I don’t understand,” he said, but again his face gave him away. He understood perfectly.

“There’s a lot of money on the table, Doctor. Not to mention Dresner’s entire legacy. If it were to become public that he was involved in these kinds of experiments…”

“But we’re…We’ve been…” the aging scientist stammered, suddenly incapable of getting a sentence out. His hesitation suggested that Smith had guessed right. Dresner was involved.

“What happened in Sarabat?” Randi said, getting impatient.

When Eichmann didn’t answer, she reached for the knob of the door and opened it. “I don’t have time for this. If you don’t want to talk, get out.”

“What?” the German said. “But—”

“But your old friend will have you killed?” she said. “That’s right, Gerd. He will. In fact, I doubt you’ll last two hours without our protection.”

When he didn’t move, she closed the door again. “I believe we were talking about Afghanistan?”

Again, Eichmann didn’t respond. He was clearly having a hard time processing the seismic shift in his universe — that his benefactor and oldest friend was now a mortal enemy.

“He’s a different man than he was when you escaped the Soviets,” Smith prompted. “Wealth, power, fame. Those things can change you.”

The German nodded numbly. “I’m nothing. Nothing compared with him.”

“Why didn’t the people in Sarabat fight back?” Randi said, but Smith subtly waved her off. He wanted to give the good cop some stage time.

“Doctor?”

Eichmann stared at the floor for a few seconds and then looked up to meet his eye. “It was the dream.”

“What dream? What were you trying to do? Influence people’s behavior?”

“Christian just wanted to help. After everything that happened to him — the Nazis, the Soviets — he realized that our primitive instincts were combining with modern technology, media, and politics to destroy us. He wanted to change that.”

“I remember that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars on educational research,” Smith said. “But that was more than thirty years ago.”

Eichmann licked his lips nervously. “Yes. We set up charter schools all over the world and educated tens of thousands of children for free. What wasn’t clear to the public was that the students were carefully chosen. Randomized.”

“So that you could test various educational theories,” Smith said. “Year-round school, separating boys and girls, classroom size, home intervention…”

“We tried them all. Every teaching technique and idea that had ever been conceived.”

“And it was a huge success. I learned about it in college.”

The German shook his head. “No. We made it look that way by choosing what data we released. The truth is that different educational techniques have almost no effect on intelligence and behavior. And what little impact they do have disappears in adulthood. But he didn’t believe it. Neither of us did. School and parenting virtually useless? The majority of our destiny written at birth? How could this be true?”

“So you created the study that I saw back at your house.”

“Christian decided we needed to try more drastic interventions — and to get the remaining cultural noise out of the data.”

The old man fell silent and Smith walked to the sink to get him a glass of water. “We’re not here to judge you, Dr. Eichmann. We’re here because the U.S. military needs to understand the technology it’s going to be relying on for the next hundred years. We’re not people who like surprises.”

Eichmann accepted the glass and took a hesitant sip from it. “As I’m sure you surmised, we took children from all over the world.”

“Took?” Randi said, but then fell silent when Smith shot her an angry glance.

“Some parents are willing to accept money, others are open to the promise that their children will be given opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise. Hospital workers are amenable to mixing up paperwork for the right price. And sometimes it’s as simple as directing and facilitating adoptions.”

In his peripheral vision, Smith could see Randi’s horrified expression turn to anger. And as a human being, he understood completely. But as a scientist, he couldn’t help being intrigued.

“So you created a perfectly controlled behavioral study.”

“The first — and almost certainly last — in history. We put children from poor or abusive backgrounds into ideal environments, we put children from privileged backgrounds into brothels and on the street. We split up fraternal and identical twins. We even populated an isolated village in North Korea with children from all over the world and controlled every aspect of their life and upbringing.”

“Gathering data the whole time.”

“We had various ways of giving parents and children personality and IQ tests — through school, extracurricular activities, job interviews, and the like. We looked at every aspect of life outcomes and I just recently finished a comprehensive analysis of all the data. Though, in truth, we’ve known what we would discover for a long time.”

“And what was that?”

“Our minds are just sophisticated computers. Some are very powerful, others aren’t. And all come with preexisting software. A child of wealthy, highly intelligent Chinese parents taken at birth and put on the street in Cambodia will retain an IQ and personality closely related to the birth parents she never met. The reason parenting and education techniques change constantly with no real effect on society is because they don’t matter. Who we will become is largely determined before we’re born.”

Smith thought about his own parents, trying to calculate the effect of the environment they’d provided. The truth was that his intelligence had been recognized at a very early age despite the fact that they hadn’t been particularly interventionist on that front. And both had been horrified when he joined the military.

“So the real purpose of the Merge isn’t augmented reality,” Randi said, making an unconvincing effort to mimic Smith’s calm, friendly tone. “It’s to change the way the human mind works. The men in Sarabat lost their faith and didn’t fight back because the Merge destroyed that part of their brain—”

“No!” Eichmann responded. “It doesn’t destroy anything. It just regulates brain waves. And the unit we used there is very different from the one you’re familiar with — much larger, with enormous rates of power consumption. Our hope was that we could—”

“Strip us of who we are?” Randi said, finishing his sentence.

For the first time, Eichmann met her eye. He was a scientist first and foremost, and his fear was starting to be overshadowed by the subject matter. It was something Smith understood and he was unashamedly hanging on the man’s every word. It appeared that Dresner’s brilliance and ambition went well beyond anything anyone had ever imagined. Unfortunately, so did his insanity.

“Who we are?” the German said. “We aren’t anyone. You’re a calculating machine made of meat. A neurotic, violent, depressive computing device. Where do you think love comes from? God? Don’t be absurd. It’s an illusion created by natural selection. People who felt compelled to protect their family had more children survive than people who didn’t and they passed on that trait. But there’s a dark side to those survival instincts: greed, cruelty, bigotry. All emotions are like this — strategies for either spreading our genes or stopping others from spreading theirs. Together, they create the illusion that we exist. That we have consciousness.”

It was a fascinating theory, but not one Smith was fully willing to accept. “If an illusion is perfect enough, though, it is real.”

“Exactly!” Eichmann said. “But what if we could manipulate that illusion and change the perverse Darwinist incentives that control our species? What if we could dull the drive for self-interest and increase the pleasure of giving? What if we could provide the happiness that so many have harmed themselves and others for but never really achieved?”

“Make everyone Christian Dresner’s robot,” Randi said. “Take away our free will.”

“You’re wrong!” he said, actually slamming a hand down onto the table. “There is no free will. Evolution has imprisoned us. Consider the trivial example of diet: We crave fatty, sugary foods that used to be important to our survival but now kill us. It isn’t our will to eat those foods. Quite the opposite. It’s an artifact of programming written a million years ago without our knowledge or permission. What if we could change it? That is free will. What we have now is slavery.”

Randi opened her mouth to speak, but the old man cut her off. “We would have forced no one. If you want to remain angry and unfulfilled, searching for relief from drugs or violence or sex or money, that would be your choice.”

Smith’s head was spinning. His work in medicine had convinced him that over the next fifty years the line between man and machine would become increasingly blurry. But he’d always thought in physical terms: prostheses, artificial organs. Dresner’s ideas weren’t so confined. He wanted to reinvent humanity. To perfect it.

“And this is something you can actually do,” Smith said, stunned. “You proved that in Afghanistan. All you need is a more efficient power supply.”

“No,” Eichmann admitted as his manic energy faded. “Even without the battery issues, it was a complete failure. Behavioral control had bizarre side effects and massive inconsistencies among individuals. And the real-world environment just made them worse. Perhaps Christian learned something from the experiment that could help him but I doubt it. If he had another half century, he might be able to produce something usable. But he doesn’t. Neither of us do.”

“What Christian learned? You weren’t involved?

“I analyzed the data downloaded from the Afghan units as well as the video of the villagers’ behavior. But my area of expertise is narrow and I’m not involved in many of the technical aspects. Most of the major research is done in North Korea and I have very little access to that. I’ve only been to that facility twice, and there’s an entire wing I’m barred from.”

Smith chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. A moment ago he had been more or less satisfied that he had everything he needed to write his report. Of course, the president and Dresner would have to sit down and hash out exactly what had happened and what capabilities existed that hadn’t been made public, but that wasn’t his problem.

Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t a surprise to him that North Korea had been used as a location for a testing facility — it was a country largely hidden from the rest of the world with a government desperate for hard currency and an expendable population. But now he had to wonder if the North Koreans could have gained access to the military operating system. And even if they hadn’t, what was going on in the facility that Dresner wouldn’t even discuss with his oldest friend? Was his research more advanced than Eichmann knew? Was he developing some completely new capability?

“Tell me more about the North Korean facility,” Smith said.

The German scientist shrugged. “My understanding is that it’s in the process of being dismantled. In the coming weeks, it will cease to exist.”

Smith chewed a little harder on his lip. So whatever Dresner was doing there, it appeared that he’d finished and wanted the evidence wiped from the face of the earth.

“Do you have contacts there?”

“At the facility? Of course. I’ve worked with the director on a number of projects.”

“Do you have a way of getting in touch with him?”

“I have his private number,” Eichmann said, starting to sound a bit suspicious. “Why?”

“Call it. Tell him you’re on your way with two assistants.”

“What? I have no authority to go there. Christian has always—”

“Tell him Dresner wants you to check up on the dismantling of the facility,” Randi said.

“What if he calls and checks? What if we get there and he knows we aren’t authorized? No. I won’t do it.”

Smith pointed to the door. “Then best of luck to you.”